Student Wellbeing

Respectful Relationships-

Help Seeking

The Respectful Relationships program helps schools promote and model respect, positive attitudes, and healthy behaviours. It teaches children how to build healthy relationships, develop resilience, and grow their confidence. The program aims to create a culture of respect and equality across the entire community, from classrooms and staffrooms to sporting fields and social events.

This term, students are focusing on help-seeking—learning how and when to seek support for problems that are too big to handle alone. This helps normalise and remove the stigma around asking for help. Through scenario-based activities, students learn to recognise situations where help is needed, identify trusted sources of support, and practice seeking help from both peers and adults.

In class, students have been exploring questions like:

When should we ask for help?
Who are the trusted people we can turn to for support?

They’ve also practiced asking for help from their peers and adults. It’s a great idea to talk with your child about who their trusted adults are and who they would go to when they need help.

If you are one of those trusted adults, here are a few key things to remember:

Listen without interrupting.
Validate the child's feelings.
Reflect on whether action is needed or if talking about the issue is enough.
Empower the child to find a solution, rather than solving it for them.

Georgina Manning's thoughts of Reflective Listening when our child seeks help.

Children need at least one person in their life that truly understands how they are feeling. Giving emotional support starts with reflective listening where we truly hear and understand how a situation is, how they are feeling and how it is impacting on them. Often, we are quick to step in and offer solutions to help comfort but what they really need is to know that you understand. Research shows that even just helping children to label an emotion is enough to lessen the stress response and decrease anxiety.
So how do you do reflective listening? When a child talks to you about something, truly listen to what they are saying without jumping in with advice, comments, solutions judgements and emotional reactions. Keep your own perception around the issue separate and just hear what they are saying and listen out for the emotion they are expressing.
Keeping your own emotions in check is also important, as this is about the child and their feelings. Reflect on what they have said but summarising the content and the emotion e.g. ‘So you had a really tough day today and you felt really hurt by your friends.’ Children will soon tell you if this summary is in the ballpark of how they feel and what happened. Don’t worry about getting it all right, it’s the intent that counts. Children know when people are really listening and trying to understand their situation.
Once you reflect back on how they felt and what happened, then they will most likely share more of what they feel and what happened. This can be a real challenge for both teachers and parents, as it’s so easy to fall into the trap of problem-solving for children to ease their pain however to ease emotional suffering, children need to first express their feelings in the arms of someone who cares. Once all feelings are expressed, then it’s time to help children solve the problem (if there is something to be solved) and this can be done by encouraging them to develop effective problem-solving skills to build their resilience.
When parents step in and start to ask questions and try to ‘investigate’ what is happening in their children’s lives, we can probably guarantee they will shut down and be hesitant to share. It is easy for parents to become emotional and start asking all sorts of questions in an attempt to solve their children’s distress, however their child’s distress will not be heard or comforted as the conversation quickly becomes about the parents emotions, rather than staying focused on the child’s emotional support. Children really hate it when parents start asking direct questions and can sense parent’s anxiety in seconds and it doesn’t take long for children to shut down and stop talking.
When using the reflective listening technique, parents can see how easily their child will open up and share their feelings, share their day, share their worries and share their friendship issues. When a parent just reflects back what the child is saying and is not focused on their own anxieties and questions, children just keep on opening up and most importantly feel supported. As hard as it is, one of the most important skills we can learn as a parent, is to keep calm when our children are upset, and just be a comfort to them.